April 2026
Intermediate
624 pages
12h 3m
English
book
Rewired, 2nd Edition
by Eric Lamarre, Kate Smaje, Robert Levin, Alex Singla, Alexander Sukharevsky
Content preview from Rewired, 2nd Edition
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CHAPTER 5Reimagining workflows with agentic AI
E.ON Next is a major UK electricity and gas supplier focused on renewable energy and digital customer services.1 The company has more than five million customers and fields over seven million calls each year, even with multiple self-service options available. Its interactive voice response (IVR) system only resolved about 13% of inquiries, leaving the rest to human customer service representatives.
In 2024, E.ON Next saw an opportunity to further improve the experience of their customers by introducing an AI voice agent. This was in keeping with their “feel-good” promise to customers.
The company decided to develop a real-time agentic conversational AI capability for customer service. One year later, customer satisfaction scores had jumped six percentage points compared to the prior system of IVR combined with human interactions.
Average call handling time dropped 8% compared to the IVR system. Furthermore, the success rate for transactions handled by the AI voice agent has improved by 14% compared to the IVR system. More than 40% of calls are fully identified and verified by the AI voice agent, reducing the average cost to manage inbound calls by close to 50%.
So, what’s not to like?!
This is a home run for agentic AI, and it shows the extraordinary potential this technology offers to reengineer business workflows. We wrote this chapter not only to celebrate what’s possible but also to examine the real work required to turn the ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.